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So I recently attended SolidWorks World, and in one of the presentations, the speaker had these chips with some very interesting surface textures on 3D printed parts. I have attached pictures of a couple of the pieces. Unfortunately, the presenter was not very familiar with the parts, and when asked what was used to impart the texture, his answer was “I’m not really sure, maybe Rhino”.

So I wanted to jump on here, get your thoughts. I am not really all too familiar with Rhino, but was not able to recreate something like this on the demo. And imparting detailed textures is not going to be easy or ideal in SolidWorks. So, what would you use to impart some interesting surface finishes on your 3D model?

texture_triangles.jpg
texture_triangles.jpg3024×4032 1.86 MB
texture_delta.jpg
texture_delta.jpg3024×4032 1.73 MB

5 Likes
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Are they imported stock textures, or drawn in the cad and arrayed (copied)?

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This should be quite easy to do in ZBrush, even in ZBrushCore with alphas (=greyscale textures used to modifiy the surface mesh) (is it you who posted on formlabs board too?).
Haven’t had the time to try myself yet but it’s also something I’m interested in.

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I love the potential here! I have seen a demo similar to this using a gcode generator that one of my community friends is developing for her job. She was able to produce surface designs using vector patterns and lots of code to produce some very interesting flat patterns on the top layers of her prints. I can’t wait to see it in consumer slicers!

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I know this is an older thread, but you could accomplish this in no time at all with OpenScad.

Tinkercad, which is probably too lite for you, has a repeat function. Create a small line block, duplicate it, move it, duplicate it again, and it moves in a repeat of the previous move. Very easy to get quick patterns.

Just some suggestions…

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threw this together in about 5 minutes, so dont be too critical.
cool_luulia.stl (2.36 MB)